Special Issue of FACHSPRACHE on Legal Phraseology and Specialised Meanings in Multilingual Settings

Guest editors: Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski (University of Łódź) Gianluca Pontrandolfo (University of Trieste)

Corpus linguistics and the emergence of specialised computerised resources have given fresh impetus to the study of phraseology. This has resulted in the emergence of the distributional (Evert, 2004), frequency-based (Nesselhauf, 2004) approach which adopts a bottom-up corpus-driven approach to identify lexical co-occurrences (Sinclair, 1987). At the same time, the notion of phraseology has expanded to denote “the whole range of co-occurrence patterns” (Granger 2005) or “the co-occurrence of a form or a lemma of a lexical item and one more or additional linguistic elements of various kinds which functions as one semantic unit in a clause or sentence and whose frequency of co-occurrence is larger than expected on the basis of chance” (Gries 2008:6). Despite the growing interest in phraseology and its recognised pervasiveness in language (e.g. Granger & Meunier, 2008; Römer& Schulze, 2009), research into phraseological items and patterns in legal discourse remains relatively underexplored. This perceived gap in legal phraseology research is particularly serious in respect of multilingual, contrastive studies.

From a theoretical perspective, few attempts have been made so far to define the conceptual borders of legal phraseological patterns, with the remarkable exception of Kjær (1990a, 1990b, 2007).

From an applied/textual perspective, the existence of recurrent combinations of words in legal language has never been questioned since the very preliminary studies on legal language (see, for example, the early studies on binomial and multinomial expressions: Mellinkoff 1963, 1982; Crystal & Davy 1969; Gustafsson 1975, 1984; Thorntorn 1987; Maley 1987, 1994; Child 1992; Bhatia 1984, 1993; Wagner 2002).However, apart from these preliminary – exclusively monolingual/intralingual (English) – studies, there are no systematic and multilingual investigations focusing on phraseology in legal language.

The existing research in legal phraseology can be classified into four main groups (see Pontrandolfo 2013: 151-166):
1. Traditional studies that focus on the lexico-syntactic combinations of words in legal discourse, especially on specialised collocations (see, among others, Berdychowska 1999, NardonSchmid 2002, Lombardi 2004, Rovere 1999, Nystedt 2000, Cruz Martínez 2002, Giráldez 2007, Anderson 2006, Montenegro Assunção 2007, Biel 2011, Bhatia et al. 2004)
2. Studies that deal with the formulaic nature of legal language by means of routine formulae used in legal communication (see, among others, Rega 2000, Monzó 2001, Carvalho Fonseca 2007, Giurizzato 2008, Bukovčan 2009)
3. Lexicographic investigations aimed at compiling legal dictionaries or glossaries/terminological databases (see, among others, De Groot 1999, François &Grass 1997, Grass 1999, Valero Gisbert 2008, Fernández Bello 2008, Gómez Royo 2010)
4. Studies that adopt a less rigid notion of phraseology and rely on large collections of legal corpora, used as tools to retrieve co-occurrence patterns, following a distributional approach (see, for example, Mazzi 2009, 2010; Kopaczyk 2013; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2006; 2011; Goźdź-Roszkowski &Pontrandolfo, forth.)

The editors invite submissions that present innovative studies addressing empirical/data-driven investigations on phraseological patterns in legal discourse/institutional settings, especially from a contrastive, cross-linguistic and/or corpus perspective. Special emphasis should be placed on the role of phraseological items and patterns in expressing and encoding specialised meanings, including social, interactive and cognitive aspects linked to knowledge maintenance structure and transfer, generic integrity and variation.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
1. How phraseological patterns reflect conceptual knowledge frames, scripts and mental models in which legal terms are embedded;
2. How phraseology is used to express evaluation, evidentiality and stance;
3. How phraseological patterns can be used to examine variation in legal genres;
4. How phraseology can contribute to maintaining generic integrity;
5. The relationship between terminology and phraseology in legal discourse;
6. Data-driven studies on traditional phraseological patterns (e.g. lexical collocations, lexical bundles, routine formulae, doublets and triplets, etc.);
7. Phraseology and legal translation;
8. Translation-oriented studies of phraseological patterns;
9. Translated vs. non-translated legal phraseology;

Submission details

Language of the publication: Papers should be submitted in English. 

Important dates 

  • 15 June 2014: Submission of abstracts to: legalphraseology2015@gmail.com .  Abstracts of up to 700 words (exclusive of references) should clearly state research questions, approach, method, data and (expected) results.
  • 15 July 2014: Notification of acceptance  
  • 1 January 2015 : A journal-ready paper for review to be submitted by email to Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo
  • Mid-November 2015: Publication 

Selected relevant references

 

  • Bhatia, V. K. (1993) Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. London/New York: Longman.
  • Biel, Łucja (2012) “Areas of similarity and difference in legal phraseology: collocations of key terms in UK and Polish company law” In A. Pamies, J.-M. Pazos Bretaña and L. Luque Nadal (eds.) Phraseology and Discourse: Cross-Linguistic and Corpus-based Approach. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag, 225–233.
  • Evert, S.(2004) The Statistics of Word Cooccurrences: Word Pairs and Collocations, PhDdissertation, University of Stuttgart.
  • Goźdź –Roszkowski, S. (2006) “Frequent Phraseology in Contractual Instruments: A Corpus-Based Study” In M. Gotti & D. Giannoni (eds.) New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis. Bern: Peter Lang, 147-162.
  • Goźdź-Roszkowski S. & Pontrandolfo G. (forthcoming, 2014). “Facing the facts: evaluative patterns in English and Italian judicial language”. Language and Law in Professional Discourse: Issues and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • Goźdź-Roszkowski S. &Pontrandolfo G. (forthcoming, 2014) “Evaluative patterns in judicial discourse: a corpus-based phraseological perspective on American and Italian criminal judgments” Research in Language Vol. 12 Issue 1 Mar 2014.
  • Granger, S. (2005) “Pushing Back the Limits of Phraseology: How Far Can We Go?”. In C. Cosme, C. Gouverneur, F. Meunier y M. Paquot (eds.) Proceedings of Phraseology 2005. An Interdisciplinary Conference, Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 165-168.
  • Granger, S. & Paquot, M. (2008) (eds.) Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
  • Gries, S. Th. (2008) “Phraseology and Linguistic Theory: A brief Survey”. In S. Granger & F. Meunier (eds.) Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3-25.
  • Kjær, A.-L. (1990a) “Context-Conditioned Word Combinations in Legal Language». Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF , vol. 1, 1-2, 21-32.
  • Kjær, A.-L. (1990b) “Phraseology Research - State-of-the-Art. Methods of Describing Word Combinations in Language for Specific Purposes”. Terminology Science and Research, Journal of the International Institute of Terminology Research – IITF , vol. 1, 1-2, 3-20.
  • Kjær, A.-L. (2007) “Phrasemes in Legal Texts” In H. Burger (ed.) Phraseologie/Phraseology. EininternationalesHandbuchzeitgenössischerForschung/An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, vol. I-II, Berlin: de Gruyter, 506-516.
  • Nesselhauf, N. (2004) “What are collocations?” In D. Allerton, N. Nesselhauf, P. Skandera (eds.) PhraseologicalUnits: Basic Concepts and theirApplication, 1-21. Basel: Schwabe.
  • Pontrandolfo, G. (2013) La fraseología en las sentencias penales: un estudio contrastivo español-italiano-inglés basado en corpus. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Trieste. [url=http://www.openstarts.units.it/xmlui/handle/10077/8590]http://www.openstarts.units.it/xmlui/handle/10077/8590[/url]
  • Römer, U. & Schulze, R. (eds.) (2009), Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Posted by The Editors on 23rd Mar 2014
in Call for Papers

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